Wednesday, 13 May 2015

The Walpoles, The Grand Tour & the Country House.

Father, Son &
Houghton Hall

On returning from the Grand Tour Horace Walpole discovered
that he was now keeper of his father’s art collection. Though the son had
become estranged from the father, the interest in pictures would bring them
closer together in the latter’s years of retirement. The strain was due to Sir
Robert’s neglect of his son for the world of politics where he was Prime
Minister; so Horace found that he was now custodian of the Premier’s
collection. Part of Walpole’s “duties” was to oversee the removal of pictures
from Downing Street and his father’s other London residences to Houghton Hall,
Norfolk, the country seat of the Walpoles. Here Walpole Jnr helped to design
the picture galleries and compile a catalogue of his father’s collection (1743-47).
A letter to the English Ambassador to Florence, Horace Mann, contains
information that Horace is building a new gallery in a part of the house that
was previously a greenhouse. As Brownell points out “since the majority of
Robert Walpole’s pictures had been collected during the two decades following
Walpole’s birth in 1717, the Houghton collection amounts to the nursery of his
taste in the arts.”[1] So
what does Sir Robert’s collection reveal about the Walpole’s tastes? To
investigate that one has to become familiar with Horace’s catalogue of the
collection, Aedes Walpoliane, as well
as the destiny of the collection- to be sold to Catherine the Great in 1779.
There is also the question of the father and son’s purpose in forming and
curating this collection which would become “the nucleus of the Hermitage.”[2]
Were they interested in the aesthetic and/or intellectual qualities of painting
or did the Walpole collections serve another purpose.

William Hogarth and James Thornhill, Speaker
Arthur Onslow Calling upon Sir Robert Walpole to Speak in the House of Commons,
1730, oil on canvas, 127 x 99 cm, NT, Clandon Park, near Guildford, Surrey.

Jonathan Richardson and John Wooton, Portrait of
Sir Robert Walpole, 1727, oil on canvas, Private Collection.

The point of departure for anybody studying the collecting
habits of Sir Robert Walpole is 1722 when the foundations of Houghton Hall were
laid due to the sizeable sums of money he made in the South Seas. Though there
is some evidence to place him in the sale room about 1717, Sir Robert’s
collecting habits become more visible when he employs artists to buy pictures
on his behalf. One of these, Charles Jervas (1675-1739) painted about a dozen
portraits of the Walpole family, referred to by the son as “wretched daubings.”
Though unsuccessful at taking Raphael drawings out of Italy, Jervas did manage
to extract paintings by Carlo Maratta (1625-1715) who was one of Sir Robert’s
favourite painters to whom he dedicated an entire room at Houghton. One of the
most famous pictures was Maratta’s Judgement
of Paris brought back from the Grand Tour by Sir Robert’s son Edward in
1722. The other important Maratta was the Portrait
of Pope Clement IX removed from Downing Street, and deemed important enough
to be written about by the English connoisseur George Vertue who thought Sir
Robert’s portrait was the original (Vatican), though copies were known. Maratta’s
portrait is not of the calibre of Velasquez’s Portrait of Innocent X which was undoubtedly the model for it, but
it is considered the nearest thing he produced to a masterpiece.[3]
In 1723 Sir Robert bought no less than fourteen full-size Van Dyck portraits
including the Portrait of the Duke of
Wharton (£1,500), though they did not meet with the approval of Vertue.Much to the distaste of English connoisseurs, Sir Robert
owned a series of four market scenes by the Flemish painter Franz Snyders which
seem to have been regarded as furniture rather than art works in themselves.
For those who believe the debate ignited by the NT’s Director-General, Helen
Ghoosh about wether the visiting public should see paintings in the midst of
furnishings is recent, alook at the
response of George Vertue will show that the issue of paintings as
art/paintings as furniture was alive in the early 18th century. On
inspecting the hanging of the Snyder scenes, Vertue felt compelled to criticise
the use of the decorative effect which worked against the artist’s original
idea of how the market scenes should be seen. Vertue was by no means the only
critic of the Houghton hanging, as can be seen in the remarks by his patron Edward
Harley in 1713.[4]

Carlo
Maratta, the Judgement of Paris, on the floor at Houghton during restoration.

As a model for a catalogue of a grand house Walpole chose an
appropriate one: the Barberini’s Aedes
Barberinae of 1642. As Francis Haskell says, this was “a lavishly
illustrated volume…published with an ample, though somewhat generalized account
of its contents.”[5] Walpole’s
counterpart had no less ambition since it was designed like the Barberini to
celebrate the nobility of a distinguished family: the pictures were considered
“panegyrics on your [Sir Robert’s] nobility,” as well as proclaiming with no
little pride the magnificence of Houghton Hall.[6]
The Aedes Walpolianae was
supplemented by Horace’s “Sermon on Painting” (1742) and an estate poem by his
Cambridge tutor, John Whalley which through orotund verse escorts the visitor across
the Norfolk countryside to Houghton and introduces the picture collection there.
Opinions about the Aedes Walpolianae
are divided, but Brenall points out that there is little art criticism in it
and that it “is not the work of an art critic, but of a courtesy-book gentleman
who returned from the Grand Tour with a disgust for European connoisseurs,
sceptical of the art trade, convinced that Italian art collections were
degenerate and decaying,” not all the appropriate pursuit for a respectable
M.P. who should look upon artists with condescension.[7]
Sir Robert’s country house with its art and statuary should be seen as an
extension of his political activities and ambitions. It was entirely fitting
that an aristocrat and the Prime Minister of the land should live in such a
splendid residence surrounded by the trappings of culture. And then as now,
philistinism can co-exist with art and literature; like recent prime ministers,
a privileged education does not always open the eyes and mind to the beauties
of art. Sir Robert’s favourite painter Maratta is the kind of artist an
undemanding patron little versed in the history of art might select, halfway
between boring and moderately interesting. But the father’s limited tastes are
nothing compared to his son whose opinions on art would today be dismissed as
unconscionable and absurd. A perusal of Horace Walpole’s catalogue reveals that
he was outspoken, and probably deliberately provocative in his criticism of the
Italian schools of painting. Walpole especially reserves his ire for the
Florentine school that is criticised for “hard drawing” though Leonardo is
exempt. Walpole is less hard on the French School which was represented by four
painters at Houghton Hall: Eustache Le Sueur is admired, though he is
criticised for his folds which are “mean and unnatural.” His great colleague
Poussin though praised as “a perfect master of expression and drawing” is
criticised because “the proportion of his figures is rather too long.” Walpole
must have had in mind the monumental Holy Family which hung over the chimney in
the Embroidered Bed Chamber. Claude and Gaspar Poussin are spared with the
latter dubbed “the Raphael of landscape painting.” Predictably, the Dutch and
Flemish painters (with the exception of Rubens) are banished from Walpole’s
empire of taste. Surprisingly, Anthony Van Dyck is lambasted for a “want of
beauty.”

David
Teniers the Younger, The Kitchen, 1646, Oil on canvas, 171 x 237 cm, The
Hermitage, St. Petersburg.

The Caprices of
Collecting: Art at Strawberry Hill

Thanks to an on-line reconstruction of Walpole’s collection
at Strawberry Hill by Yale University we can get an immediate impression of the
contents of his collection. It is eclectic to say the least: old masters such
as Flemish and French paintings, statuary like his Roman Eagle (installed in
his library), prints, objet d’ art, books, portfolios, chairs, lamps etc. As we
shall see though, Walpole’s overriding preference was for portraits, mainly
English, such as the lesser-known John Astley who painted the portrait of Sir
Horace Mann, first port of call for English milordi on the Grand Tour in
Florence; Richard Bentley who drew Walpole’s picture gallery and was painted by
Eccardt who did Walpole’s own portrait; Reynold’s more famous portrait of
Walpole as well as Sir Joshua’s elegant portraitof the Ladies Waldegrave;
but in contrast to this eighteenth-century amplitude, one also finds a few graceful
miniatures by the likes of Hilliard, Holbein, and other exponents of Elizabethan
English painting. This is not surprising as Walpole had a taste for historical
portraiture such as pictures of Henry VIII, Catherine de Medici, and Charles II
who the collector said he had met in a dream! In this dream, which as Brenall
says was reminiscent of the atmosphere in Walpole’s Gothic novel The Castle
of Otranto, the gallery as in Bentley’s sketch appeared before his eyes;
portraits such as Richard II came to life and greeted the dreamer-collector. There
were some problem paintings including the intriguing Portrait of a Marriage (library) by an unknown Flemish renaissance
master, which Walpole insisted showed the marriage of Henry VI, an
identification received with scepticism by Vertue and completely overturned in the
nineteenth-century. Apart from portraits there were other genres represented: a
bacchanal by a follower of Poussin (Round Drawing Room), now in Washington.[8]
Last but not least, in the Tribune or Cabinet, could be found an enigmatic painting
of an elegant couple in parkland, La Boudeuse (“A Capricious Woman”)
by Watteau. The word capricious could stand for Walpole’s attitude to
collecting art; If ever a collection was assembled according to the whims and
fancies of a single individual, this was it.

Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, London.

John Carter, View of the Library at Strawberry
Hill, 1788, watercolour, The Lewis Walpole Library.

Horace Walpole visited many stately homes, and therefore had
a good idea of the collections of the land. He would keep abreast of
aristocratic deaths resulting in sales, and managed to acquire art this way
especially if Strawberry’s “Gothic eye” were to look favourably upon the
desired art object. The “Prime Minister of Taste” was also in demand as a
cataloguer of other collections, and one of these was the magnificent gallery
of portraits at Woburn Abbey, seat of the Dukes of Bedford. According to the
late Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures Oliver Millar, the collection of
portraits at Woburn ranked with the collections at Althorp, Petworth and
Welbeck, even despite some of it being sold at Christie’s in 1951.[9]
The earliest Woburn picture lists were compiled by Vertue in 1727, and Walpole
himself visited Woburn in 1751 and drew up a long list of pictures which served
as a foundation for Waagen who visited in 1835. Later, in his old age, and
suffering from gout and other maladies, Walpole had to abandon his impetuous
project of cataloguing the Woburn portraits. As Brenall says Walpole’s notes
for this unfulfilled project demonstrate his method of “monumenting portraits”
i.e., by building up a picture of the painted person from an ensemble of
sources from which he gleaned facts about their character, marriage, family and
other factors. Walpole was very protective of his portraits. When a visitor
Anne Liddle removed a portrait of herself from the Breakfast Room at Strawberry
Hill, its owner wrote a furious letter which throws some insight on his
attitudes to this genre: “I was in a monstrous passion at your taking away your
picture and so I am sure will my ghost be, if it is ever removed out of this
blue room while poor Strawberry exists. One is an artificial being: I and my
friends and this place compose but one idea in my mind, and it is lopping a
limb to touch any of the constituent parts- so, how I should not have been
angry, I don’t know.”

17)William Hogarth and James Thornhill, Speaker
Arthur Onslow Calling upon Sir Robert Walpole to Speak in the House of Commons,
1730, oil on canvas, 127 x 99 cm, NT, Clandon Park, near Guildford, Surrey.

[3]
See the comments in Johnstone and others, Vatican Splendour: Masterpieces of
Baroque Art, Ottawa, 1986,

no. 12

[4] Cited
in Brenall, Prime Minister of Taste, 41-42: “In the saloon are a great
many fine pictures, particularly the famous Markets of Snyder, but I think they
are very oddly put up, one is above the other and joined in the middle with a
thin piece of wood gilt. It is certainly wrong because as these pictures of the
markets were painted to one point of view, and to be even with the eye, they
certainly ought not to be put one above another, besides that narrow gold ledge
that is between the two pictures takes the eye and has a very ill effect.”

[8]The Nurture of Jupiter. Blunt (R 80)
rejected it as a work by the so-called “Hovingham Master,” and Wright (no. A31)
places it in his group of attributions since he considers it might be a
“one-off” composition of the 1630s “much more akin to the mood and colour
schemes of Guercino.” See also Anthony Blunt, "Poussin Studies XII: The
Hovingham Master" Burlington Magazine (103 704 Nov., 1961): 454-461.

[9]
Oliver Millar, “The Early Portraits of the Russells” in Woburn Abbey and its
Collections, Apollo, 1965, 29-37, 29.

[10]
From Yale web site: Provenance: Ragley Copy: Not Strawberry Hill Collection.
Probably given by the sitter to his cousin, Francis Seymour Conway, 1st
Marquess of Hertford; thence by descent. National Portrait Gallery Copy: Not
Strawberry Hill Collection. Apparently painted for Grosvenor Bedford (1708-71),
the sitter’s deputy as usher of the Exchequer , still in the Bedford family 24
December 1847 when Sir Robert Peel wrote to John Smith, dealer, declining to
buy it; Lady Colum Crichton-Stuart; bt by 3rd Marquess of Lansdowne before the
Grosvenor Charles Bedford sale of 1861; thence by descent until 1999 when
acquired by private treaty sale from the Bowood Collection with assistance from
the Heritage Lottery Fund, the NACF, and the Gallery’s Helen Gardner Fund.

[11]
Acc to Walpole painted when 83 years old; criticizes the drawing of the Juno.

[12]
Houghton (Maratta Room). Over the chimney; bt by Jervas from the Arnaldi Palace
at Florence, part of the Pallavicini coll from which Sir Robert obtained many
of his pictures.

[16]
For more on Poussin’s Holy Families, follow this link.
Seen in the Houghton collection by Vertue in 1739. In the Embroidered Bed
Chamber at Houghton, Walpole describes it “Over the Chimney, the Holy Family
large as Life. It is one of the most Capital Pictures in this Collection, the
Airs of the Heads, and the draperies are in the fine taste of Raphael, and the
Antique. Elizabeth’s Head is taken from a Statue of an Old Woman in the Villa
Borghese at Rome, the colouring is much higher than his usual manner. The
Virgin’s head and the young Jesus are particularly delicate.”

[17] Probably
the picture called by Walpole “Morellio in the manner of Vandyke,” in the Carlo
Maratta room; taken to Strawberry Hill.

[29]
Identified by Walpole at the R.A. 1782 exhibition as one of [Reynold’s] “most
enchanting portraits” as “Lady Althorpe,” daughter of one of Walpole’s
favourite artists, Margaret Smith, Lady Luca. Lavinia Bingham was married on 6th
March 1781 to George John Spencer, Viscount Althorp.

1 comment:

Many years ago in the process of researching my doctoral dissertation on the political career of General Henry Seymour Conway, the nephew of Sir Robert Walpole and cousin and best friend of Horace, I read most of the letters and journals of Horace Walpole. Thanks for this comprehensive essay.

My wife and I visited Houghton two years ago for the exhibition and then went to Strawberry Hill where, unfortunately, most of the art and interior decoration is gone. I've wanted to search the Yale Walpole index for references to Giorgione and your essay might get me going.